1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a personal service support method, system, and apparatus for assisting inquiries about user operations in a virtual world.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a virtual world created on a computer, characters or objects representing users (hereinafter referred to as avatars) come into contact with various locations, scenes and objects, and build up experiences in communities in a virtual world like in the real world. However, when avatars do not have enough knowledge of new locations, scenes and objects, the avatars may need help and use various help techniques.
In addition, an avatar is provided with help mainly by other avatars such as avatars of other users and shop assistants around the avatar, and is likely to be provided with such help by through face-to-face dialog or interaction with another avatar. Therefore, what is required is a virtual world-specific help technique that enables avatars, such as avatars of other users and shop assistants around the avatar, to use an interactive help history.
In general an interactive help history is created mainly based on, for example, users' inquiry logs at a call center. To respond to an inquiry made by a user, texts and related items are extracted from the interactive help history using a technique such as a similarity search, and are presented as an answer to the user. The context of the extracted text and related items will be highly similar to the context of the user's inquiry. Various methods have been proposed for such a help technique.
For example, Japanese Patent Translation Publication No. 2001-504960 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 1) provides a method of updating a knowledge base for answering inquiries. In the method according to Patent Document 1, a knowledge database contains statistical information on messages including inquiries or comments, answers to the messages, the number of inquiries and the like is used to automatically respond to the inquiries and the messages. Furthermore, in the method described in Patent Document 1, if it is not possible to respond with the knowledge database, the inquiries are provided to a subject matter expert or people on a help list created in advance, and then the subject matter expert updates the knowledge database.
Furthermore, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-133295 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 2) describes a method and an apparatus for assisting people on a help list to provide quick responses to inquiries. In a manner similar to Patent Document 1, the method described in Patent Document 2 uses a knowledge database having statistical information on messages including inquiries or comments, answers to the messages, the number of inquiries and the like. The method described in Patent Document 2 involves: receiving the messages including inquiries or comments, which are described in emails; automatically transmitting the messages to experts when the knowledge database does not contain appropriate responses to the messages; and then having the subject matter experts respond to the messages.
Moreover, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-115259 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 3) discloses a method for assisting users to perform their own duties, by using past inquiries and answers as well as experts' knowledge. In the method described in Patent Document 3, the stored contents of past inquiries and responses are stored as response record information pieces. Then, when a request to answer a new question is received from a user, certain response record information pieces are obtained and displayed on a screen watched by an answerer who answers the new question or the user who had asked the new question. Here, the response record information pieces thus obtained and displayed are in the field of designated duties that the user is responsible for, and have been created in response to question-answer requests from the user and other users.
However, the help histories used in the methods described in Patent Documents 1, 2 and 3 are created by simply storing users' inquiries and agents'answers to them, where an agent is a person or avatar who answers a question from a user. Consequently, users still face the problem in which the inquiries and answers are not stored in a reusable form. Furthermore, another problem is that because the help histories contain similar inquiries and answers, the information in the help histories is redundant. Moreover, all the methods described in Patent Documents 1, 2 and 3 use a similarity search on text information when obtaining answers from the help histories. However, the use of the help history is not suitable when obtaining answers from the help history in a virtual world because continuous changes in locations of objects targeted for questions and the objects in a virtual world cannot be described as search conditions.
In consideration of the above problems, the present invention provides a personal service support method, system, apparatus and computer program for assisting inquiries about user operations by use of dialog records of users' inquiries and agents' answers to the inquiries, the dialog records being obtained in a virtual world and edited in a reusable form.